Surviving our children-and Alaskan politics-one day at a time.

Archive for July, 2009

If you’re tired of reading about you-know-who or health care, take a mental break and watch this video. It’ll make you laugh, and if I know one thing for sure, we all need more laughter in our lives. Enjoy.

Look, Sarah, u r not 12 yrs old. It’s time 2 grow up and act yr age. This is gting rly embarsing for us. We can’t stnd 2 c u like this. Yr tweets r like nails on a chlkbrd.

Like Lisa Kogan said in the November 2008 Oprah magazine, “Junior high is just one long daisy chain of nonstop mean, and you have officially survived it. That’s right, my friend, you may have to face locusts, drought, and World War III, but you can now go forth secure in the understanding that seventh grade is over. You get to wake up each and every morning without worrying that Arleen Posner got the same Frye boots as you. You will never have to read Beowulf, be groped by a 13-year-old reeking of his father’s Aqua Velva, or feather your bangs again. The enormity of this revelation must not be underestimated.”

Before Sarah hijacked this blog, I had a regular feature called CineMonday! which highlighted a movie that I had recently watched. Now that Sarah is moving toward the background of my mind, I’ve decided it’s time to resurrect CineMonday! for the good of my readers (and myself).

Sicko is a must-watch movie for all Americans. It goes deep into the abyss which is the American healthcare system. Moore travels all over the country as well as to France and England to gather stories. The movie is not about the uninsured, but about the millions of Americans who are insured but who either cannot afford their deductibles or are denied services because of financial decisions made by a board of directors.

One story in particular hit home with me- a woman told the story of her 18-month-old daughter who came down with a fever of over 104 degrees. She took her to the hospital and was told that she had to go to a different hospital because her health insurance wouldn’t cover the costs of treatment. The woman begged the hospital staff to help her little girl, but was eventually escorted out of the building because she was “a threat.” By the time the woman got to the other hospital, the baby had died.

Tragedies like this are occurring every day in this country because our health care system is run by private insurance companies. In England and France (and every other western country), universal health care is the norm, and although there are some drawbacks, it is regarded as some of the best care in the world. You walk into a hospital, get treated and walk out without having to pay a dime. In one hospital, Moore interviewed the “cashier,” who gave cash reimbursements to patients for their travel to and from the hospital.

Sicko is very informative and while I know that we must take what Moore has to say with a grain of salt, it was definitely worth watching. I recommend it to everyone, especially right now as we debate what health care in America should look like.

So long, Sarah, I won’t miss you. No, it’s true. I wish you would just fade away into obscurity instead of beginning your new career as Tweeter-in-Chief. You have been an embarrassment to our state, and we will never be thought of without people thinking of your ridiculous antics over the past year.

You were never really our Governor, were you? You keep saying you care about us, but it’s obvious to me and many others that this has been all about you. You failed to make a positive difference for so many groups. Native Alaskans, rape victims, schoolchildren, single moms, subsistence fishermen, domestic abuse victims…I could go on. I can’t imagine how you could hold up your administration and claim that you are proud of their accomplishments. You should be ashamed of how you treated us. It’s not a joke, Sarah. I’m not laughing.

You sure did make a name for yourself, though, didn’t you? You are now a household name and a whole heap richer. Thanks for “fighting” for us.

The Tundra Drums is reporting that some federal stimulus money will be making its way to rural Alaskan villages to help replace honey buckets with flush toilets. In this day and age, no one should be using a honey bucket. When I lived in the village, I had a honey bucket for the first 4 1/2 years. Finally, in the last year of my time there, a flush toilet was installed in my house. We had a huge water tank in the bathroom that also ran to the kitchen so that we could have running water to wash our hands and cook with. It emptied into a bucket under the sink which we had to haul outside to dump, but hey, we weren’t complaining.

Using the honey bucket was gross enough, but having to empty it was worse. No one wanted to be the one to empty it, and once it got too full, well, you had a problem. Hauling a practically overflowing bucket of human waste on a sled in the middle of a blizzard down to the local “lagoon” was probably the worst part of living in the village. I cringe just thinking about it.

So, if nothing else good comes out of the stimulus package (and I know it will), at least there will be fewer people that have to make that weekly trip to the lagoon. Thank you, President Obama.